Lawyers Hit The Facebook Jackpot With IPO

The Facebook IPO is one deal every lawyer in town was hoping to get in on — and the winners are in.

According to Facebook’s filing on Wednesday, a cast of attorneys from Fenwick & West LLP and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP are advising on the deal. The advisers are listed prominently at the front of the widely-viewed, and much-anticipated filing.

It’s a triumph not only because of the high profile nature of the assignment, but the potential for big fees as Facebook is seeking to raise as much as $10 billion when it goes public in the spring.

One of the victors, Simpson Thacher, headquartered in New York, is an international law firm with more than 800 lawyers across the world. The other, Fenwick & West, a national law firm with offices primarily in the western U.S., advises clients in technology and life sciences, according to its web site.

The lawyers listed in the filing from Simpson Thacher are William Hinman Jr. and Daniel Webb, both partners in the firm’s corporate department, according to the filing.

Mr. Hinman has been involved in a number of public offerings, including the IPOs of Google and eBay, according to his online bio. Mr. Webb’s bio says he has recently advised on capital markets transactions involving a number of companies, including Associated Materials, Bioform Medical, CoreLogic, Genomic Health, Goodman Global Group, Ikanos Communications, lululemon athletica, and VeriFone Holdings.

Gordon Davidson is leading the team from Fenwick. He is the firm’s chairman and a partner in its corporate group, according to his online bio. Mr. Davidson has worked on some 40 public offerings and his publicly traded clients have included some big names such as Cisco Systems, Inc., Oracle Corp., and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Also listed as being on the Fenwick team, according to the filing, are Jeffrey Vetter, a partner in Fenwick’s corporate group and a co-chair of its securities group, and James Evans, an associate in the Corporate Group.

Facebook, of course, has its own in-house lawyers working on the deal. That list includes Theodore Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, and David W. Kling, and Michael L. Johnson, according to the filing.

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